A Rights-less Vacuum: Satire, Selfhood, and the Disintegration of Rights in Mahasweta Devi's The Glory of Sri Sri Ganesh

Abstract

This paper analyzes Mahasweta Devi's "The Glory of Sri Sri Ganesh" as a scathing critique of the post-colonial Indian state, viewed through the prism of the disintegration of rights. The story's protagonists, the Kheria Sabar tribe, are rendered "non-beings" by a state which refuses to acknowledge their material and political existence, evidenced by their total absence in the census. The paper argues that their central act-the meticulous manufacturing of a miracle-is not a turn to superstition but a required and logical satirical strategy for survival within this "rights-less vacuum". Denied access to the language of law, citizenship, or protest, the Kheria Sabars are forced to deploy the only language the state and capital understand: spectacle, religion, and profit. This analysis deconstructs this ruse as the only form of politics available to the erased. The paper concludes that while the "miracle" succeeds in solving their problem of invisibility, it does not solve their problem of rightlessness: they gain recognition but not rights. The new "selfhood" they fabricate is shown to be a fragile, performative identity, contingent on their god's profitability rather than their humanity. Devi's bitter satire, therefore, reveals a system that will build a road for a stone god but not for a starving people and illustrates skillfully that the "glory" of Sri Sri Ganesh is the ultimate symbol of the state's systemic and human failure.